Why I said “learning online is soul-destroying”

Someone has emailed me to argue that their new online language-learning activities are an antidote to the March 2001 Wall Street Journal article/interview in which I said “learning online is a soul-destroying experience”

I felt that my negative remarks, and indeed my other similar remarks about “E-Learning is Dead” might be misconstrued, so I wrote the following as part of my reply, which I post herewith for the benefit/interest of others:

I hope you’re aware of the fact that the emphasis of the WSJ article, and certainly my personal stance within it, concerned the weaknesses inherent in “purely online” experiences. The UK’s Open University (which has all of its 200,000 annual student enrollment online anyway as a natural consequence of the way it functions), succeeds precisely because the “online” element is merely an incidental and natural facet of how we work with our students, rather than the MAIN concept! In other words, it’s all part of the mix. The five key ingredients of our success (no secret because they have been widely discussed elsewhere) are as follows:

1. Quality content – teams of experts of international standing produce, review and edit all materials, backed by multimedia/graphics/design/BBC crews of “Hollywood-blockbuster” proportions and quality

2. Quality accreditation – Open University degrees are consistently very highly valued by employers

3. Quality support – almost 10,000 part-time tutors (academic staff at other instutions), around the globe, provide the monitoring, mentoring, tutoring, marking, and general support for the 200,000 students; a 20-to-1 ratio that typically involves a significant amount of face-to-face interaction at local study centres, colleges, even pubs if necessary.

4. Quality experience – the overall ‘shared experience’ is an important attribute by which students select from among rival institutions, and on which the Open University is highly regarded

5. Quality research – when teaching staff are engaged in front-line quality research, they make better teachers, so the OU encourages a strong research profile.

Any institution that can consisitently achieve the above 5 can be a top player in distance learning, and yes, there will of course be a major online element too. The Open University is consistently ranked (by formal national assessment criteria) among the top 10 Universities in the UK for the quality of its teaching. Yet any “Online” institution, I personally believe, will fail on most of the above 5 criteria, because achieving *ANY* of the 5 above is orders of magnitude harder than it looks. Achieving all 5 is nearly impossible. But we’ve done it!

I say all of the above just to set the record straight. Yes, “online learning sucks” (or whatever I claimed in that article). I’ve even gone so far lately as to claim “E-Learning is dead”. But supported, open, distance learning, as The Open University has shown, can be a great experience for students: it just has to be done well! And the “online” element is increasingly a routine component, like, well, electricity – though of course this component has to be done well, too!

The Open University does a lot of language tuition by the way– indeed, I’m even a student on an OU Spanish course at the moment, and we use a very-large scale voice-on-the net tool (Lyceum) that I created originally in the mid-1990’s, and which now supports many thousands of simultaneous users. This provides a great end-user experience at a distance, for those who have problems attending the normal face-to-face tutorials, which is why we built it.

OK, I’ll get off my soap-box now. I have absolutely no doubt that motivated individuals like yourself can produce very high quality online language learning materials, and it would be interesting to see what they are like. I thought it would be useful in my comments above to make it clear that “distance learning”, “supported open learning” (both specialisms of The Open University) and “online learning” are not necessarily the same thing.